As an associate professor in the Film Department at Berklee College of Music, Michael Sweet leads the development game scoring curriculum. He is an accomplished game audio composer who is widely recognized for continued innovation in music and sound. Sweet has been the audio director for more than 100 games. He composed the Xbox 360 startup sound and audio logo, won the best audio award at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) and the BDA Promax Award for best sound design for a network package (HBO Zone), and has been nominated four Game Audio Network Guild (GANG) awards.

Sweet was the cofounder and creative director of Audiobrain, a company dedicated to innovation with interactive sound design and music. As the founder of two separate companies dedicated to interactive audio, he has created numerous emotionally immersive, award-winning experiences for games, broadcast, and sonic branding. His work can be heard on the Xbox 360 logo and on award-winning games from Cartoon Network, Sesame Workshop, PlayFirst, iWin, Shockwave, RealArcade, Pogo, Microsoft, Lego, AOL, and MTV. Sweet has composed numerous network identities, including HBO, VH1, Comedy Central, CNN, General Motors, and NASDAQ. His digital artistry has resulted in groundbreaking interactive scores for digital design installations that have traveled the world.

Sweet is frequently a featured speaker at prestigious industry events, including the Game Developers Conference, the Montreal Game Summit, Audio Engineering Society (AES), New York University, Parsons School of Design, and Savannah College of Art and Design's GDX Conference.

Career Highlights

Composer and sound designer

Former group creative director of interactive media for Audiobrain

Work on the Xbox 360 logo and many award-winning games from Cartoon Network, Sesame Workshop, Shockwave, RealArcade, iWin, PlayFirst, Pogo, Microsoft, Lego, AOL, and MTV, as well as network identities for HBO, VH1, Comedy Central, CNN, General Motors, and NASDAQ

Awards

BDA Promax Award, best sound for a network package

Independent Games Festival Award, best audio

Game Audio Network Guild (GANG) awards, four nominations

Education

B.M., Berklee College of Music

In Their Own Words

"Video game audio is a multidisciplinary field; it's so varied and massive in scope, with about six disciplines combined into one. We're doing a lot of cross-collaboration with the MP&E Department. I'm teaching Introduction to Interactive Music, Interactive Scoring for Games, Music and Sound Production for Games, and some general film scoring classes."

"On one hand, you have to be the John Williams: you have to write the music. But on the other hand, for it to work with the video game, there's also the logic of how all that music is going to work together in the game and how that stuff interacts. For composers, you have to wrap your head around some new concepts that you don't encounter as a linear film composer. Those things include branching and looping, and being able to transition from one place to another very quickly. In a game, you have to plan for all the variances of how a player might actually be interacting with the game."

"Berklee is trying to develop composers over three or four semesters where they can hone their craft specifically for game audio. We're trying to get them out into the field prepared; they'll know a lot of material, they'll have worked on a bunch of interactive projects, and they'll have a breadth of experience that they wouldn't be able to get at another university."

"I want to build the John Williams for video games in the next generations. I think that's a really exciting opportunity for not just me, but Berklee in general, to be able to really put composers out in the world who tip things on their head and are doing things that have never been done before, who will really take things to the next level."